digiown

The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US.

The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.

Daily reminder that these tools are made possible by the power of general purpose computing, and corporate interests want to take it away. In a hypothetical future not too far from us where your devices become "trusted", you will have to view whatever they want you to see, with no recourse like blocking ads or undesirable content.

SingleFile does the archiving fairly well.

> no privacy worries

This is harder than you might expect. Publishing these files is always risky because sites can serve you fingerprinting data, like some hidden HTML tag containing your IP and other identifiers.

IA has always been in legal jeopardy without offering paid access. For that to work we need to get rid of copyright first.

As an aside, it seems cool that the bar to reverse engineering has lowered from all the LLMs. Maybe we'll get to take full control of many of these "smart" devices that require proprietary/spyware apps and use them in a fully private way. There's no excuse that any such apps solely to interact with devices locally need to connect to the internet, like dishwasher.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-wont-connect-my-dis...

So everyone and their mom and all the foreign governments can buy the data, but not your own government? Do you really think this is a sustainable arrangement?

The whole point of a regulation is to ban something they are currently allowed to do. There was a time before the civil rights laws where you can discriminate by race, you know.

It can be banned explicitly as a regulation on surveillance cameras. Like:

- The footage must be secured / only stored locally, and can only be used in legal proceedings or liability, and can be stored for maximum 1 (or a different number) year

- It cannot be sold or used to train AI or processed for marketing or other purposes without consent of all involved (in practice impossible).

- And no people cannot "agree" to things by just entering the premises or view

- It is illegal to make decisions based on illegally obtained (as per above) analytics, like refusing entry/membership/service, with a private right of action

Thanks for the legal clarification. I don't disagree that the third part doctrine is rather overbroad.

I would still prefer legislation and tech that actually reduce data collection though. Fifth amendment protections are much stronger, and cannot be overcome by a warrant, whereas third parties can be subject to subpoena.

I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said

> normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed

Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google.

> Neither is there an expectation [...]

Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law. You might feel that we should have that right anyway, but many other governments with a more recent/flexible constitution do not guarantee that, and in fact require key disclosure.

A private company can rat you out the government in the same way that a private citizen can report you to the police. I don't see a reasonable way to change this.

The government should be held to higher standards in terms of being able to appeal its actions, fairness, evidentiary standards. But the government shouldn't necessarily be prevented from acquiring and using information (which is otherwise legally obtained).

I don't disagree that we should perhaps more restrictions on private processing of data though -- GDPR style legislation that imposes a cost on data collection is probably sufficient.

I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place.

I don't think tying the hands of the government is a viable solution. The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, as well as legislation to impose costs on data collection.

- Teaching that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"

- E2EE cloud

- Some way of sharing things that don't involve pushing them to the whole internet, like Signal's stories.

- GDPR type legislation which allows deleting, opting out, etc

That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.

I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.

Reminds me of these Reddit API protests for.. one day. Of course it didn't work.

You can't because there is a network monopoly and barrier to entry is sky high. Realistically, your only option is to piggyback on Android by developing an Android-compatible OS like Huawei did. However this will soon become impossible anyway, as Google will abuse Play Integrity to make your device unusable.

The only way out is either regulation or a whole paradigm shift that renders phones irrelevant. I'm not sure the latter will happen any time soon.

RCS on Android seems to require Google services, which is just as bad as Apple, and seems to not work well with GrapheneOS.

Agreed. Doorbell is one thing, it terrifies me that people put these inside their homes. It's like 1984 but they're paying for it.

I wouldn't trust E2EE implemented by an entity against itself that can also push arbitrary updates in principle. Also, any E2EE product that has a non-E2EE mode seems prone to accidental leaks.

Frigate and some cameras that can stream to an NVR. No cloud, you can use a VPN for remote access.

https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/hardware/

I'm sure your server will be fine. Now if you put up a big declaration like that on your website, some bureaucrat might just decide to pick on you when they get the chance like France with Durov.

Oops your plane had some issue on its way to a different European country and now has to make an emergency landing at Heathrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair_Flight_4978

Discord has always had dark patterns which basically ban anonymity. If you aren't fingerprintable enough (using VPN, etc) they will force you to enter a phone number. They also encourage guild admins to require it, although it is technically a choice.

If you get rid of a lot of inefficiencies (unnecessary parking, land use segregation increase travel distances, and restrictions on multi family apartments), there will be so much more space available that it would lower housing prices by a lot for everyone. The tax revenues can also offset other taxes like income or sales taxes which also reduce inefficiency.

Value creation not captured is the definition of a positive externality, and landlords being able to extract that value despite not creating them is an example of rent seeking. Aiming to address these does not somehow question capitalism.

It can be transferred by lowering sales or corporate taxes. It is also indirectly transferred by encouraging more valuable land use around the retail like public transport or complementary businesses.

> which can only destroy value

One of the stronger arguments for LVT is that land is inherently inelastic, and thus taxing it doesn't create inefficiency (deadweight loss).

Other taxes like sales tax destroy value because they create a deadweight loss by preventing transactions that would otherwise occur. Land supply is constant, so LVT is purely a wealth transfer, and does not create inefficiencies.

KDEconnect over a VPN works extremely well for clipboard and file and notification sharing. You don't have to use KDE for it. It works with Linux and Android. It also doesn't require an account and accepting terms, so it is strictly superior.

Linux has few defenses against the compromise of individual programs leading to the whole system being compromised. If you stick to basic tools (command line) that you can fully trust, it might be somewhat resistant to these types of attacks. The kernel might be reasonably secure but in typical setups, any RCE in any program is a complete compromise.

Things like QubesOS can help, but it's quite high-effort to use and isn't compatible with any phone I know of.

We have a word for this: a backdoor. It wouldn't de-legitimize the secondary access market. It would just delegitimize Apple itself to the same level. Apple seems to care about its reputation as the defender of privacy, regardless of how true it is in practice, and providing that mechanism destroys it completely.

This reminds me of those side channel attacks in crypto. Maybe it works, but any adversary most certainly has easier ways of surveilling you, like hidden cameras with facial recognition.